What Zoom Removes

Guest post by C. Thi Nguyen

The paradox of Zoom is: it should make life easy, but it can also make life really, really hard.

My time teaching on Zoom basically broke me. It left me spiritless, drained, miserable. One standard explanation is that the physical and cognitive experience of Zoom is exhausting in and of itself — that Zoom screws with all these minutae of eye contact and bodily signaling. But I’ve started to suspect that the effects of Zoom extend far beyond the experience of actually being on Zoom. Zoom re-orders your entire life.

Halfway through my first Zoom teaching term, I was absolutely falling apart. I slowly realized that, for me, a big part of it was that Zoom had eliminated by commute. Which is strange, because I thought I hated my commute. But my commute had also been one of the few totally isolated parts of my day. I was sealed off from other people and from other demands — from my email, from my phone, from my children. My car commute was enforced non-productive time. And it was non-negotiable. In work-from-home pandemic life, you can try to tell yourself that you should go for a walk or something every day. But when push comes to shove, you can always give up that walk. The commute cannot be bargained with.

Kelsey Piper puts it this way: sometimes, a tiny change in your routine can throw everything out of whack. You didn’t realize that the little change you made took out a load-bearing support for your whole emotional infrastructure. You didn’t realize that your walk to lunch was your only bit of sunshine and fresh air — and how much you needed those moments to unclench. You didn’t realize that this yoga class imposed an specific schedule into your day, or that this new emailing app would mean getting work emails on your phone 24/7. And so you change one little thing, and then everything goes haywire.

Albert Borgmann, the philosopher of technology (and one of Heidegger’s last students), talks about a similar effect, writ large. He’s worried about what a culture might unthinkingly eliminate, in the march of technology. What happens when a society takes out one of its load-bearing supports?

According to Borgmann, there are two basic kinds of human artifacts: things and devices. Things are embedded in a complex network of activity and socialization. His favorite example: a wood-burning stove. Using a wood-burning stove drags you into a complex and textured form of life. You have to acquire the wood. This means going out to chop it yourself, or talking with somebody who will chop it for you. You have to stack the wood. You have to manage the fire — watching it, stirring it, adding fuel to it. And a wood-burning stove creates a particular social world. It create a center for home life, says Borgmann — a social focal point. There is a warm spot where people congregate, and a periphery to where people can retreat. The wood-stove drags with it an entire pattern of life — of skill, of involvement, of attention to the world, of a particular embedded in a social web.

Compare a wood-burning stove with central heating. Central heating is a device. Central heating makes heat appear invisibly and effortlessly. It appears out of nowhere, evenly distributed. You don’t have to fuss with anything, or know anything about how the heat was made. You don’t have to exercise any sort of skill. The method of production drops out of sight.

Says Borgmann:

We have seen that a thing such as a fireplace provides warmth, but it inevitably provides those many other elements that compose the world of the fireplace. We are inclined to think of these additional elements as burdensome, and they were undoubtedly often so experienced. A device such as a central heating plant procures mere warmth and disburdens us of all other elements. They are taken over by the machinery of the device. The machinery makes no demands on our skill, strength, or attention, and it is less demanding the less it makes its presence felt.

The progress of technology, says Borgmann, is driving us further into what he calls “the device paradigm”. The point of a device lies solely in its output — what he calls its commodity. The commodity of central heating is warmth. The commodity of a car is transportation. And unlike a thing, a device gives its users that commodity disconnected from the process of its creation. Frozen food lets you have a meal without cooking it for yourself. Central heating lets you have warmth without fussing around with a wood stove. A device is a kind of shortcut to its commodity. And if we think that all we really want is that commodity — then we want the device to hide from us all the mechanisms by which it creates those commodities. We want the process shoved out of sight, excised from our lives. So we make better devices, that give us faster access to what we think we want. They are better, from our perspective, because they further disentangle the commodity from all these other burdensome elements.

Of course, the key is that we only think these other elements are burdensome. But these burdensome elements also drive us into the complex world, says Borgmann. They drive us into social relationships, into activity, into a rich and sensuous experience of the detailed world. Devices divest us of that. They give us only the thing that we thought we had wanted. But that’s good only if we know exactly what’s good for us.

In graduate school, as I was losing myself to stress, I became temporarily obsessed with fishing. I fantasized about it, I craved it, and I went every weekend I could. I was also terrible at it. I caught an embarrassingly small number of fish, in my years of fishing. Eventually I gave it up as another failed hobby. Without it, I could devote so many more of my hours to my research.

Of course, once I eliminated fishing, my mental and emotional state started to deteriorate, and fast. Here was my mistake: I had thought that the point of fishing was to catch some fish. But, in reality, it was not. The process of fishing was one that forced me out of my tiny apartment, out of the library, away from books and computers. It made me suffer through LA traffic (while listening to music). It made me search through forgotten mountain paths for an unfished stream. It made me stand in a river and do nothing but stare at moving water for hours on end. It gave me days that were so full of fussy and physical detail that I had to stop thinking about philosophy completely. And then I got rid of it, because I didn’t actually understand what I was getting out of it. Fishing wasn’t just about fish. It was a pattern of a whole life, dragged in by the attempt to catch a little fish.

Zoom, I want to suggest, is a device. It is a device for communication. And my point here isn’t that Zoom is somehow “fake” communication, or that virtual meetings aren’t real. It’s that Zoom gets rid of all the other stuff that surrounds a communicative encounter. It makes communication frictionless. It delivers communication as a commodity. Zoom offers a whole new basic pattern and rhythm for a life, by divesting us of that burdensome friction. Without Zoom, you had to commute to school or work. You had to listen to your stupid podcasts and your music. You had to walk around and run into people, to negotiate with them, to chat aimlessly with them, to figure out how to co-occupy physical spaces with them. Before the Zoom Era, I had to fly to conferences, which involved this whole weird complex and deeply annoying endeavor that took me out of my habit, out of my standard rituals. Flying pushed me into strange parts of the world where I had to re-orient myself, to figure out how to be in a space that wasn’t my own. With Zoom, I can go to an unlimited number of international conferences effortlessly. But also, I never leave the habitual patterns of my home life.

Of course, Zoom also brings enormous benefits. So does every device. In my academic life, it’s apparent: Zoom makes it easier for people without travel funding to attend conferences, for students with complex childcare obligations to attend classes. Dishwashers ease the burden of domestic labor. And I’m certainly not giving up my dishwasher or my motorized transport, and the ease and accessibility that Zoom offers is basically irresistible.

But Borgmann gives us a reason, at least, to be cautious with a device, to watch carefully how it reshapes our lives. A lot of times, the value of a thing in our lives is not just what it presents, on its face, as its function. So much of the time, the beauty of an activity is in the process of doing it, and not the simple output. But it’s easy to forget. Things spread their tendrils through our lives, they reshape our interactions and procedures in a thousand countless ways. Devices like Zoom — efficient, frictionless little miracles — give us what we think we want, but they also cut off all those tendrils. And sometimes there was value in that friction, too.

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